Sarah L. Winchester (c. 1840 – September 5, 1922) was the wife of William Wirt Winchester and heiress to his estate and a 50% holding in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company following his death from tuberculosis in 1881. She is best known for using her vast fortune to continue construction on the San Jose mansion for 38 consecutive years.[1] Popular legends, which began during her lifetime, held that she was convinced she was cursed, and the only way to alleviate it was to add on to her California home. Since her death, the sprawling Winchester Mystery House has become a popular tourist attraction, known for its many staircases and its corridors leading nowhere.

The couple was married in 1862, had one daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester, who was born on June 15, 1866 but died after a few weeks, on July 25, 1866[4] from the childhood disease marasmus. The couple had no more children.

Her father-in-law, Oliver Winchester, died in 1880, quickly followed in March 1881 by husband William, who died of tuberculosis, giving her approximately 50 percent ownership in the Winchester company and an income of $1,000 a day. (That was equivalent to roughly $23,400 a day in 2013.)

According to the legends surrounding her, she felt that her family was cursed, and sought out spiritualists to determine what she should do. A Boston medium, Adam Coons, believed to be a psychic, allegedly told her that the Winchester family was cursed by the spirits of all the people who had been killed by the Winchester rifle and that she should move west to build a house for herself and the spirits. The medium is claimed to have told her that if construction on the house ever stopped, she would join her husband and infant daughter. In 1884,[4] Mrs Winchester moved west to California with her sister and her niece, and in 1884, she purchased an eight-room farmhouse from John Hamm.[4] It stood on 161 acres (0.65 km2) of land in what is now San Jose, California. Immediately, she began spending her $20 million inheritance by renovating and adding more rooms to the house, with work continuing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the next 38 years. According to proprietors of the house, she was fascinated with the number 13 and worked the number into the house in many places. (There are 13 bathrooms, many windows have 13 panes, chandeliers have 13 candles, and so forth.) Her biographer casts doubt on this story, however, and offers up an account from a carpenter who worked on the property for many years who claimed that architectural elements, such as chandeliers and windows, were altered after Winchester's death.[5] Contemporary scholars dispute the veracity of the claim that construction work continued, except for brief periods, after the 1906 earthquake.[4]

For 38 consecutive years, Mrs Winchester personally oversaw the 24-hour-a-day construction of her California mansion.

After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, she was trapped in one of her bedrooms for several hours. However, when she got out, she told the construction crews to stop working on the nearly-completed front part of the house and had her carpenters board it up, leaving much of the extensive earthquake damage unrepaired. Again, according to the legends, she thought the spirits were angry with her because she was spending too much time decorating and working on the front rooms. Construction resumed on new additions and remodeling the other parts of the structure. Her full-time address from the earthquake until her death was in Atherton, California. She visited the ranch and house in San Jose only periodically.[4]

Constant construction and the lack of a master plan made the house become very large and quite complex. Many of the serving staff needed a map to navigate the house. The house also features doors that open into walls, staircases that lead nowhere, the recurring number 13, and windows that look into other walls. There are two theories as to why she built such an unusual house. The first is by far the most popular and states that she built the house to confuse the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles. The second, much less popular, is that while she was an exceedingly wealthy woman and could build her house any way that she wanted, she had no architectural training at all so some of the oddities could be simple design error.

The Winchester Mystery House is a National Historic Landmark, a San Jose historic landmark, and California historic landmark number 868.

In 1888 Winchester purchased 140 acres of land, the majority of what is now downtown Los Altos, California, to use as a ranch. She also purchased a farmhouse, now known as the Winchester-Merriman House for her sister and brother-in-law. The house, located at 762 Edgewood Lane in Los Altos, is currently on the Historic Resources Inventory of the Los Altos Historical Commission.[6][7]

The farmhouse at 762 Edgewood Lane in Los Altos

In the 1920s Mrs Winchester also maintained a houseboat on San Francisco Bay at Burlingame, California, which became known as "Sarah's Ark," as it was reputedly kept there as insurance against her fear of a second great flood, such as the Biblical one experienced by Noah and his family, but a more mundane answer is that many people of her social standing in California at that time had houseboats or yachts. The "Ark" was located near the eucalyptus grove at Winchester Road, south of what was to become the intersection of Anza Boulevard and U.S. Highway 101. The ark was destroyed by fire in 1929.[8]

On September 5, 1922, she died in her sleep of heart failure at the age of 83, and construction on the Winchester Mystery House stopped.[2] A service was held in Palo Alto, California, and her remains lay at Alta Mesa Cemetery until they were transferred, along with those of her sister, to New Haven, Connecticut.[4] She was buried next to her husband and infant child in Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut. She left a will written in 13 sections, which she signed 13 times.[9] The belongings in Winchester Mystery House were left to her niece, Marian I. Marriott, who took what she wanted and auctioned the rest off.

According to the current owners of the house, it took movers eight truckloads a day for six and a half weeks to empty the entire house of furniture.[10] Her biographer, however, has been unable to find any evidence supporting this claim.[11] They did not mention the former home of the furniture at the auction, which makes it impossible to track down today. The furnishings that exist in the home today for tours are donations or loans that reflect the period. Because she was such a private person, no known interior photographs were taken so the exact furnishings are a mystery. (The only exception is a set of builtin cabinets in the linen room.)

Following her death, the home was auctioned to the highest bidder, who then turned it into an attraction for the public; the first tourists walked through the house in February 1923, five months after she died.

The Santa Clara-Los Gatos Boulevard in front of the house was later renamed Winchester Boulevard, after the house. Today, the house is open to the public every day except Christmas Day. Tours are conducted of both the house and the grounds on those days.

Winchester was the subject of a 2011 song of the same name, by Mathew Baynton, under his solo project Dog Ears.[12]

The song "A Certain Euphoria" from the album The Loved One by Strange Boutique, the group which Monica Richards from Faith and the Muse was a part of before beginning the latter project, is based on the legends of Mrs. Winchester.

In 2011, artist Ron Ulicny produced a piece entitled "skull of sarah winchester"; a reference to Sarah. The work consisted of a painted human skull, encrusted with gold leaf, and a magazine of Winchester bullets screwed prominently into it.[13]

New York Times; May 31, 1970, Sunday; San Jose, California. "A stairway that leads nowhere, a window that opens to reveal only a wall, a doorway that leads to nothing. These are parts of a disjointed, 160-room Victorian mansion that Mrs. Sarah Winchester built on the northern outskirts of San Jose after the sudden loss of both her husband, the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, the rifle magnate, and her daughter. After her daughter's death Sarah Winchester never tried to have kids again. Also after the death of her husband William Winchester, Sarah never married again."